The blueprint to fix local government exists. Civil engineers have been drawing it for years – SAICE
BEFORE the next municipal election on 4 November 2026, South Africans will cast their votes knowing what the past five years have delivered.
A Gauteng water crisis that left the country’s economic heartland without water for weeks, a Knysna reservoir approaching empty, and a Green Drop Report confirming that nearly half of our wastewater treatment systems are in a critical state.
The question everyone is asking is reasonable. Will a new council actually change this, or will we be having the same conversation in 2031?
The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) has spent significant time analysing the Draft White Paper on Local Government, where comments were submitted on 28 May 2026.
Our view of the White Paper is that it correctly identifies what is broken, and with the right implementation architecture, it has the potential to become the document that finally changes things on the ground, says SAICE CEO, Sekadi Phayane-Shakhane.
Rethinking how constitutional mandates serve communities
One of the most important areas that the White Paper gets right is its diagnosis of constitutional autonomy as a structural barrier.
Under the current framework, municipalities hold constitutional protection over infrastructure functions, including water, sanitation, and electricity distribution, regardless of whether they have the technical capacity to deliver them.
The result is a system that protects the dysfunction, rather than the delivery of Constitutional rights to the residents.
Part of the answer is structural. South Africa’s current two-tier system, where district and local municipalities often hold overlapping powers in the same area, has frequently produced competition rather than co-operation.
The result is bulk infrastructure, like treatment works, planned by one entity while the local pipe network that should connect to it is planned by another. The outcome is exactly what it sounds like: infrastructure that does not reach the people it was built for. SAICE supports the White Paper’s move towards a single-tier model with clearly assigned mandates, paired with a performance-linked system in which a municipality that cannot manage a function, such as water reticulation, does not retain it indefinitely.
The Drop Reports, released on 31 March 2026, laid this bare in numbers showing what should concern every South African. Nationally, 47,3% of treated water is lost or unbilled before it reaches a tap, representing approximately R9,9 billion in losses every year.
